Friday, March 30, 2007

The State Broadcasting Company strikes back



And for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to
BBC Newsnight’s daily emails …

Extract from the first email of the day from the
Newsnight team...


Those of us who inhabit the world of old media have learned the hard way to respect the power of the blogger. Over the past couple of years many an error, example of hypocrisy or attempted cover-up has been searingly exposed by the bloggers, and a few careers sunk.

We'd asked the fearless political blogger Guido Fawkes to make a film for Newsnight on what he sees as the failings of mainstream political reporting.

This was no trick, but at that point Guido was in a corner. His film had been an exhortation to programmes like Newsnight aggressively to empty-chair politicians who refuse to debate. While he himself prefers to operate in the shadows he could therefore hardly refuse, and a poll of his site's readers urged him overwhelmingly to appear.

The result, was a bit of car crash. Guido's keyboard-orientated pyrotechnics were no match for Michael White of the Guardian's verbal swordsmanship.

But hats off to Guido for entering our world. He'll be back.


Well, that’s not patronising, self-congratulatory wank at all is it?

I saw the interview in question and it wasn’t so much the poor performance of the blogger that struck me, and it was poor, it was the thinly disguised sense of anger and hate coming off both Michael White and Jeremy Paxman. They fucking hate blogs. And White was more than happy to lie through his teeth to score some points

Jason Statham doing his ever-popular Michael White impression


And then, tucked away in the second email of the day from the
Newsnight team...


KATHY SIERRA

Following death threats famous US blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online. She has had to cancel public appearances as a result. We'll be interviewing her live on blogger bullying - should there be any limits in the blogosphere?


Methinks I'm starting to see a theme developing here

Fuck ‘em


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Subversion

I am enjoying these immensely...





Details of similar projects and the kind of specialist, high-tech equipment needed to carry them out can be found here




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And, nothing to do with subversive street art at all but equally pleasurable if you happen to be a Dalek or Monty Python fan...



(found via Adhesive X's blog, ta)


though I suspect that the genius of this work will be lost on anyone who isn't British and of a certain age. Aren't cultural differences great.

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Is that a GPS in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? (redux)

I've met a lot of people outside of the UK, including the US, who have told me that they rely on British news organisations, particularly the BBC, for more even-handed coverage of world events than they get at home.

The poor, deranged fools

Helping to serve you up hot steaming shite, fresh from the horse's arse


Me, I prefer to tune-into American daytime women's chat shows to see people at least trying to discuss something more than a 'unipolar' view of what's going on in the world




Fuck me, what has the state of journalism in the English speaking world come to when
Rosie O'Donnell is now at the forefront of thoughtful, open-minded geopolitical comment?


Rosie and Chums talking about captive British sailors, the death of diplomacy, corporate domination of the media, false flag operations and WTC7 - Part 1 - Part 2


NB In keeping with my new in-house illustration policy, from this point onwards all pictures of public figures borrowed for use in this blog will be sourced wherever possible from celebrity look-alike agencies, starting with...



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Thursday, March 29, 2007

Not as hard as he thinks he is

In case anyone has missed this...





I guess he thinks he's pretty hardcore but I can't help noticing that he pulled off his little stunt
in North London. If he'd tried that in a Tube station this side of river somebody would have shot him in the back of the head nine times, wiped the videotape clean, stripped his body and sold his nice shiny skis in a pub to buy some lovely, yummy crack.

Bloody tourists...


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Is that a GPS in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?



As a history buff, I have to say how great it is to see that the ancient and noble art of the well-crafted, heavily reported, naval incident is still alive and kicking.


There’s nothing like a fuck-up involving a couple of ships to really get the party going.

Ships and sailors have always been well-suited to the task of breaking the ice between potential adversaries for several excellent reasons…
  • Ships are portable and can be easily positioned somewhere provocative. Somewhere on or around a disputed boundary usually works best

  • Ships are considered to be national territory. An attack, real or imagined, on one of your ships is tantamount to an attack on your homeland

  • Ships and sailors have a tendency to sink when you put holes in them …and they therefore tell no tales

  • The number of independent witnesses passing by in the middle of the sea is normally on the low side



And what a fine catalog of seaborne shenanigans and marine mischief history has to offer us - the USS Maine, the RMS Lusitania, the Elli, the USS Liberty, the Altmark, the Belgrano, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and, not forgetting, Captain Jenkins Ear – possibly the most bizarre pretext for a war ever!!! and an all time personal favourite…


The thing about wars in general, and the War of Jenkins Ear in particular, is the better you think you are at winning wars, as the British did for a while, the more inclined you are to grab any opportunity, and I mean any opportunity, to start one.

Cue the tragically sad story of Captain Robert Jenkins…


Under the 1729 Treaty of Seville, the British had agreed not to trade with the Spanish colonies. To verify the treaty, the Spanish were permitted to board British vessels in Spanish waters. After one such incident in 1731, Robert Jenkins, captain of the ship Rebecca, claimed that the Spanish coast guard had severed his ear. Encouraged by his government (which was determined to continue its drive toward commercial domination of the Atlantic basin), in 1738 Jenkins exhibited his pickled ear to the House of Commons, whipping up war fever against Spain. To much cheering, the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, reluctantly declared war on October 23, 1739.

Only time will tell if Leading Seaman Faye Turney and her fourteen shipmates will make it back to Blighty with all their appendages intact.


Before


After


I genuinely wish them all well, unlike the bastards who put them in Harm's way in the first place.


Still, it was handy that the BBC and The Independent had the forethought to interview LS Turney just before she was arrested by the Iranians. I thought that was a nice touch.

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

What's it good for?

Well, it looks like the Megaphone and BNP sock puppets are out in full force, commenting on the BBC 'Have Your Say' page on the current 'crisis' between Britain and Iran.

This crowd's touching concern for our servicemen is bringing a lump to my throat


Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that 'We' should reduce Teheran to rubble...


'Nuke them back to the Stoneage'

'Iran give us back our people that they have taken by force, or we take back our people by the same force and level Tehran in the process'

'Next turn, why wouldn't the mullas simply put a nuclear warhead on a postal box elsewhere?'

and so on, and so on

There are significantly fewer comments on Craig Murray's posts on the subject, where he tries to warn people about taking what the British government (his former employer) is saying at face value. A point of view which isn't getting much airtime in the mainstream press.

Time and time again, our government has been caught out lying through its teeth about what is happening in the Middle East, and pretty much everything else come to think of it. Most recently, it has been shown that when Downing Street dismissed the
Lancet's estimate of 655,000 Iraqi civilian dead as being unreliably high last year the government's own advisers were confidentially reporting that the figure was probably an underestimate. Has anyone in the mainstream run with that story? Nope. Is the BBC treating government claims about the circumstances behind the current situation with Iran with even the slightest trace of healthy scepticism? Nope

Or has anyone raised the subject of the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 and killing 290 people in 1988? Round about the time the US was pressuring Iran to make peace with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The US government claimed that the Vincennes was sailing in international waters and thought it was under attack. In truth, the ship was sailing in Iranian waters and wasn't being attacked. The guy who shot the airliner down was given a medal...

for shooting down a civilian airliner... in peacetime... whilst trespassing in another country's territory




If that isn't fucked-up I don't know what is.

Come to think of it, has anyone had the bollocks to contrast the way the Iranians are dealing with their captives with the way we in the Coalition of the Free treat some of our captives?



Of course not

The collective amnesia, bias and hypocrisy of our media is staggering. And people fall for the same old bullcrap time and time again.

One of the reasons a country as small as Britain, with its relatively small army, managed to conquer an Empire as large as it did in the 19th century was that the people who led Britain back then were smart enough to get other stupid Muppet bastards to fight Britain's wars on our behalf.

And I can't shake the feeling that it's now our turn to be the Muppets.

It's quite to difficult to fully communicate how powerless and disgusted I feel at the way my country has been manipulated, and is being manipulated, into fighting other people's bloody wars

And what can I do about it aside from rant in a blog?

Absolutely nothing...



War!

Good God!

What's it Good for?


the defence and security industries, distracting people from domestic issues, maintaining the dollar as a reserve currency, opening up new markets for multinationals, bringing about the return of the Messiah and ensuring steady supplies of cheap drugs and bananas


but aside from that...

Absolutely nothing!


I won't say it again


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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

London schoolchildren are getting crunchier

I always find myself grappling with contradictory feelings when the media covers stories about the rise, or is it the fall, of crime in the UK, particularly London.

One side of my brain, probably the left, tells me that hysterical coverage of crime stories, as put out famously by newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, is part of a drive by vested interests to scare the crap out of people so that they will agree to more laws, more CCTV, more police. More of the same ineffective bullshit that is a lot more about curbing dissent and generating revenue than making our world a genuinely better place.

Which isn't a good thing

The other side of my brain tells me that it really is getting scarier and nastier out there.

Which is hardly a good thing either

Of course, provided you're willing to indulge in a little conspiracy theorising, you can reconcile the two observations by concluding that crime is being allowed to rise deliberately so that people will call for a more, er, 'policey' state

Which, of course, puts you into David Icke 'Problem-Reaction-Solution' territory

Which means that you are mad, as well as having shocking taste in music

And then I see stories like this one in today's Times...




which, for some reason I cannot quite put my finger on, just had me laughing

... for about a minute longer than a sane person would

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Contraceptive Bicycle Shorts and Original Sin


There's absolutely no way I'm going to put up a post on the subject of Original Sin and pass up on a chance to mention the life and works of Abbe Lazzaro Spallanzani. A pioneer in the scientific study of man juice and the man who gave the world condoms for frogs.

Oh no

Forget the Galileos, the Darwins or the Newtons. By far and away the most entertaining and informative stories from the history of science are those of the scientists, often very clever, very meticulous scientists, who went to superhuman efforts to reconcile their observations with the prevailing beliefs of their times. Even when those observations flat out contradicted those beliefs.

Of course, we're a lot more sophisticated now and simply recalibrate our instruments, correct our data or simply write-off anomalies as being insignificant.

Anyway, back to Lazzaro

Lazzaro, like many of his contemporaries in the mid 1700s, was an ovist.

Ovists believed that the offspring of an individual are preformed within the egg.

Which meant that, logically, if every egg contains a tiny little preformed person, that tiny little preformed person must also contain eggs which also contain even tinier preformed people. In fact, all future generations of offspring would be contained within an egg





The great thing about ovism was that it did a very neat job of reconciling Genesis with Science. Christian ovists were able to conclude...


  • Eve literally held all of mankind in her ovaries
  • All of mankind was present inside Eve when she was cast out of Eden and therefore shares her guilt
  • As the egg bearers of mankind, women are responsible for transmitting the stain of Original Sin
  • Men do not carry eggs and are therefore inherently purer


Or put more simply



Science proves that we are all born in Sin and women are to blame


An absolutely brilliant idea. Totally bonkers, but brilliant nevertheless.

The only problem was actually proving that babies were preformed within eggs.

Enter Stage Left, Lazzaro Spallanzani...

Spallazani believed that contact between egg and semen was not necessary for generation to occur. He believed that sperm only 'awoke' the dormant embryo within the egg by means of transmission of what he called 'spermatic vapour'.

And to prove his theories he carried out an experiment in which he dressed male frogs in tight-fitting contraceptive bicycle shorts made from taffeta before introducing them socially to girl frogs.


Strangely enough, no matter how many times the boy frogs came in their pants, those spermatic vapours stubbornly failed to do their job and no tadpoles were conceived. Occasionally the shorts would split and Lo! baby frogs but Spallanzani still didn't get the hint.


Some people did take the hint and became 'spermists', believing that the imaginary, preformed little people must, obviously, be present in sperm rather than eggs; though history fails to record whether any of them went on to follow in the footsteps of The Master and fit lady amphibians with prophylactic underwear





Eventually, Spallanzani gave up on frogs and took to masturbating dogs in the name of science instead but that's another story...



Horse Whisperer


Dog Wanker



Anyway, that was pretty much that for the 'scientific' belief that sin could be transmitted through the generations genetically. And modern evolutionary theory is quite strict on the transmission of characteristics acquired by an individual in its lifetime to its offspring i.e. it doesn't happen. A man who loses a leg in accident doesn't have one-legged kids. So, presumably, a man who did something wicked in his lifetime doesn't necessarily spawn wicked children either.

At least I thought so. Until the last couple of years when I started to come across stories about the new science of epigenetics - the notion that the genes we inherit from our ancestors are shaped by their experiences and their environment. Which would mean that someone could argue that maybe we do inherit guilt for our ancestors' actions after all.

Bad news for Darwinists, excellent news for lawyers.



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Monday, March 26, 2007

Saving wretches like me

There was a time when I was pretty well up to speed with any big protest marches taking place in London but I have lost interest recently. After a while it is quite difficult to fight an apathetic sense of ‘If you’ve seen one demo you’ve seen them all’. The same protesters, the same banners, you even start recognising individual policemen.

I’m so out of touch now that I wouldn’t even know if a march or demonstration was due to pass by my flat.

Which is sort of what happened on Saturday.

Saturday started for me with the sound of Amazing Grace drifting into my bedroom.

I popped outside and discovered that Kennington Park was full of archbishops … chanting

Kennington Park - handy gathering spot for rampaging, vengeful mobs


For centuries people have gathered in Kennington Park before crossing the Thames to kick some Establishment bottom; most recently the poll tax riots back in 1990. Ah, those were the days. Marches and demonstrations were still scary and extremely photogenic back then. I suspect even policemen look wistfully back to the good old days when they actually saw some action rather than standing around in their hundreds, scratching their nuts for hours on end. Bored out of their skulls as yet another tedious procession of ring tone revolutionaries trundles by. Off to listen to Tony Benn in Trafalgar Square, spouting the same old crap he’s been spouting for decades. For fuck’s sake, what kind of Class War is that?

Sadly, Saturday’s gathering of the Bishops in Kennington Park was not the precursor to 250,000 clergymen massing together before storming across Westminster Bridge for a little bit of populist argy bargy.

No

They were commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

And by the time I strolled over to the park, admittedly a little late in the day, there weren’t that many people there. A few hundred maybe. The Archbishop to Prole ratio was on the high side.

Which, at first, surprised me.


Literally dozens of people listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury saying ' Sorry'


After a while, having listened to what a few of the speakers had to say, I was a lot less surprised by the low turnout and fucked off home myself.

A constant theme that all the speakers returned to was 'Our' shared guilt for the injustice of slavery - a guilt that has been passed on from one generation to the next. Consequently, we should all apologise for what was done two hundred and more years ago.

Bollocks

There are two groups of people in this world with a hard-on for this kind of race guilt – Christians and Lawyers.

Oh yes, and Mel Gibson

...but he's Christian

So that's still two groups.

Christians go for it because if you buy into that ‘Stain of Original Sin’ confidence trick you are effectively submitting to those who claim to be empowered by God to absolve that sin. Believing that we are born fallible is one thing. Assuming the guilt for the supposed sins of the first man and woman is an altogether different barrel of apples.

Lawyers also get moist thinking about historic race guilt because if some fucker is stupid enough to apologise even for something they had no control over, they are admitting liability and you can therefore sue their arse.


Definitely not the fault of anyone alive today


... nor is this


...nope, still not feeling responsible


The families of the people who made money out of slavery did a pretty good job of keeping hold of that money, then and now. And, for my sins, I worked in the sugar business for a few years and could easily provide a few names and addresses come the Revolution. However, the bulk of ordinary people in the UK in the late 1700s and 1800s lived hard, grim lives working in mills and factories. So why should any of their descendants apologise for, and presumably pay for, the sins of the same kind of people who fucked their own ancestors over as well as the slaves?

Aside for the thorny issue of apologising for something most us had no hand in, the abolition anniversary also throws up another tricky question

Whilst there's no doubt that many people opposed slavery because it was plain wrong, Abolition came about through the decisive influence of two groups of people with slightly more convoluted motivations – Evangelical Christians and Industrialists.

It’s no coincidence that Britain got round to ditching slavery round about the same time it was perfecting the steam engine and mass production. Ditto for the success of the abolition movement in the US forty years later - when the industrialised Northern States decided that the US did not need slaves any more.

After all, slaves represent a significant fixed cost. They have to be housed, clothed and fed by their employer. 'Free' factory workers don’t. And in an industrialised economy there are plenty of ways to effectively enslave people without being responsible for their welfare. Oh yes.

I have spent a lot of time travelling through the Southern States in the US and anyone who takes even a passing interest in their history has to ask themselves...

‘If the abolitionists and the Northerners really cared so much for the welfare of the slaves why did everyone sit back and allow those slaves and their descendants to be treated like shit for 100 years after abolition? What was going on between 1860 and 1960?'

The answer, I suspect, is that the actual welfare of the slaves was not top of many abolitionists' list of priorities once they had got what they wanted - a transfer of economic power from one group of bastards to another group of bastards for the industrialists and a ticket to Heaven for the Christians.

Which kind of takes the edge off celebrating the 200th anniversary of abolition if you happen to be a Secular Left Winger.

The moral of the tale being, I think, that sometimes good things happen for bad reasons and that judging the decency of a cause by the decency of the people who support it is not a particularly reliable test.

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Saturday, March 24, 2007

That's why mums shop at Iceland



Thanks to Paul for pointing me to economist Michael Hudson’s webpage by way of a comment on an earlier post.

There is some good stuff on the subject of debt, interest rates and asset price bubbles on that site. Though the page itself has a sort of late 1990’s feel to its layout and style and links to a bewildering minefield of file formats – flash animations, pdfs, mp3s, m3us and shonky html layouts – at least one of which is bound choke a visitor’s browser. Even if what Hudson has to say isn’t of any interest, visiting the site is a good test to see if you are up to date with all your browser plug-ins.

One audio file of Hudson speaking to a group tickled me in particular. It’s on the long side (70 minutes), is of so-so sound quality and includes some waffle. However, aside from that, it serves as a pretty good primer on the mentality and motivations of the people who lend and the people who borrow money in the kind of effervescent, bubbly times through which we are living today. It is recommended if you're into this sort of thing but only as the kind of listening material that is best consumed whilst doing something with your hands, catching up with household chores, something like that – 70 minutes
exclusively spent listening to an economist, however astute, is far too much of anyone’s life to waste.

Hudson makes an interesting observation mid-way through his talk when he points out that the total value of real estate in New York is equal to the total value of all plant and machinery in the entire US. No doubt, the same could be said about London and the UK. Hudson’s point is that the US stopped being an industrial economy long ago and the US economy is now based on property ownership, rent and usury rather than actually making things.

Which is, of course, a throw back to the good old days of feudalism

Which is nice if you either own lots of property, happen to be a money lender, or are an environmentalist who wants everyone to return to a ‘simpler’ way of life, but not so crash hot for the rest of us

HRH Prince Charles - interests include environmentalism, auto mechanics, owning Cornwall and serfing


Hudson does lose the plot at one point a little later in the talk. He explains to his American audience that house prices have become so high in Britain that people no longer invite you round for dinner because their mortgage payments are so high they cannot afford meat (!?) Which is exaggerating the current situation here in Britland just a teensy weensy little bit.

The British can still afford to eat meat. Admittedly, the kind of meat that has children growing breasts and running up the walls after they’ve eaten it but it’s definitely meat. I think...




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NB! A much shorter, less technical explanation of how the debt-inflation cycle works can be seen in this Gootube video here...




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Friday, March 23, 2007

Electric Friends

And for anyone still confused about the challenges we face due to climate change here’s a link to a video clip of former TV weather forecaster and motivational speaker (sic.), Tania Bryer explaining the science behind cloud damage



"...Perhaps the most disturbing effect is the disruption of rivers. This is footage of the River Euphrates flowing backwards. It looks like it's flowing forwards but only because we've reversed the film..."




This clip comes, of course, from Chris Morris’ spoof current affairs show Brass Eye which was made ten years ago. How time flies. The key message of the show, if any message was intended, is that you can always find a plentiful supply of celebrities willing to endorse even the most insane, most nonsensical campaign or cause. Celebrities who are ready to read any old crap off a cue card
without any questions, like a parrot; provided they are convinced they will look good and the endorsement will further their careers or ego.

Something I saw on TV last week gave me cause to root out the
Brass Eye back-catalog and watch it again for the first time in years. The show stands up pretty well and there is an aching need for the return of something that approximates to decent, toothy satire on British television.

The scene where agony aunt Claire Rayner reacts in disgust to a video supposedly taken from Japanese TV that shows people taking drugs through a dog is a minor classic..



Cannabliss!


as is the line repeated by another dickhead celebrity later in the show “
This is a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence to support this but it is scientific fact

Rumour has it that Morris might be doing a show on terrorism later in the year. I await the result with more than a little curiosity and trepidation.

The reason why I felt the need to dig out and re-watch old episodes of
Brass Eye was seeing a former member of the band Blur on TV late one night advocating personal carbon trading as the best tool available for combating global warming.

There was something especially annoying about watching a bloke, whose claim to fame is that he played in a band that became successful posing as being working-class, walking around his farm in his green wellington boots preaching to the world that imposing a corrupt trading scheme on ordinary people will save the planet

There is nothing native-born Londoners love more than a Mockney, particularly a rich one who spouts shit


Blur in concert

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And whilst posting links to videos, here’s one that will only appeal to fans of either George Formby or Gary Numan – but if you happen to fall into the target categories it’s a treat…





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Beer



Reasons not to drink
Budweiser

1. It tastes like piss (and, yes, I have tried both)

2. This...




I'd like to claim that no British brand would ever be so crass as to try and sell beer by associating it with support for our nation's servicemen who have been thrown into the middle of a fuckup by lying scumbags but, to be honest, I can't


Budweiser: Official Beer of the 2006 World Cup and the 2003 Iraq War

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Money (redux)

Here be dragons...


A few weeks ago I blathered on about inflation, debt, interest rates and the grand-daddy of all conspiracy theories -
Bankers Control the World!!!

To properly understand the Bankers Control the World!!! conspiracy theory the student theorist must first be comfortable with the concept of the Business Cycle...


The Business Cycle explained aka 'How to turn made-up money into tangible assets in 10 easy lessons...'

  1. Banks create lots of money out of thin air
  2. They lend that money to people at low interest rates
  3. Because so much money is pumped into the system its value falls
  4. Because money is worth less prices rise
  5. People have to borrow more and more made-up money from banks to pay those higher prices
  6. After a few years, banks hike up interest rates and reduce the amount of money in circulation by cutting back on lending
  7. Prices fall, as do many people's incomes
  8. The size of outstanding loans, however, does not fall
  9. People can no longer afford to service their loans and are obliged to turn their property and businesses over to the banks
  10. Repeat every 15-20 years or so

The terms 'banks' and 'bankers' are used very loosely and refer more to the people behind the banks and bankers than the banks and bankers themselves. We are, after all, talking about a hidden ruling reptilian elite

All of this Bankers Control the World!!! stuff, all of it, is insane nonsense, obviously.

For example, when faced with the news that house prices in London have risen by 22% over the last year and the average price of a home in London now stands at £366,302 (sorry, that was yesterday, it must be topping £380,000 by now) the delusional conspiracy theorist will blame the eye-watering price rises on cynical manipulation of the money supply by scheming bankers.

Whereas the clued-in people, the rationalists who really know how the world works, will know that high levels of property inflation are due to non-conspiratorial factors such as...

"Wealthy City financiers, foreign buyers and big income earners are driving the demand in London and with quality stock at an all-time low, there is an exacerbated effect on prices"

All very sane and rational.

Only a couple of problems though

First off, it's a matter of record that people are borrowing shit loads of money to buy property - not 'wealthy city financiers' or mysterious 'foreign buyers' but ordinary people being obliged to saddle themselves with buttock-clenching levels of debt to buy a home.

Second off, there's the small matter of the former Governor of the Bank of England openly 'fessing up and admitting that, yes, he and his buddies had deliberately stoked up personal debt and inflation to unsustainable levels...


"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade ... external demand was declining and related to that business investment was declining.

"We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward: One was public spending and the other was consumption.

"Now of course it's true that taxation and public spending may influence the economic climate, may influence consumer spending.

"But we knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending; we knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term.

"But for the time being, if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession just as has the United States.

"That pushed up house prices, it increased household debt ... my legacy to the MPC if you like has been 'sort that out'."


Or put another way '
Why have a recession in 2001 when you can have a full-blown depression a few years later?'

Or put another way 'We could have stimulated the economy by building infrastructure that would have served the nation for generations but decided to encourage everyone to go out and buy shit instead'

Or put another way 'Me and my mates decide the price of your house, your monthly outgoings, how much you earn, and even whether you have a job or not. And there's fuck all you can do about it'


And because ordinary people don't understand, haven't been educated to understand, how money works, bankers can pull shit like this again and again without ever being strung up from the nearest lamp post. Hats off to whoever figured this money-lending game out in the first place. He was a clever dude. Destined to burn in Hades for all Eternity, sure enough, but definitely clever.

The really intriguing part of this business is the fact that a lot of people are expecting, have been waiting for, the UK economy to go tits up - for years now. But, like the proverbial watched pot, it stubbornly refuses to boil over. Somebody or something will pop the bubble eventually but who, or what, and when?

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Help fight Global Warming whilst sitting on your arse

Do your part to halt the retreat of the glaciers with...





(thanks for the inspirational link Noel)

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